Kober on Greenpaper 1998: "One Europe, One Currency, One Patent"

This foreword of the Annual Report of the European Patent Office (EPO) of 1997, written by EPO president Kober, sounds rather euphoric. Beside engaging in uniformisation hype and celebrating the European Commission's Green Paper on the Community Patent, it also says, using political codewords related to the software patentability legislation piggybacked onto this project, that "european patents must provide reliable protection for new technologies". This is another document of the political guidance which instigated EPO judges to allow patent claims on "computer program products" in two landmark decisions of 1998, in evident violation of the existing laws. It is also a document of patent lobby's decisionmaking at the European Community level.

The Text
Annotated Links

1. The Text

In his trilingual Preface, Kober writes:

The founding of the European Patent Office 20 years ago was the first step on the road to a unified patent in Europe. The success of the European patent system demonstrates the extent to which this process meets the needs of inventors, researchers and companies alike. The number of filings is one measure of this success, but so is the fact that an ever-growing number of states and international groupings are modernising their own patent systems on the basis of this model. Despite this gratifying situation, the development of the patent protection system in Europe must not be allowed to rest. For regardless of another record number of patent filings and an initial substantial reduction in the EPO's procedural fees, applicants made their expectations clear in the year under review: European patents must cost less, they must have a unitary character and be uniformly enforceable, and they must also provide reliable protection for new technologies. The European Commission addressed these issues in its Green Paper on the Community patent and incorporated them in its proposals for extending the system. During Luxembourg's presidency of the EU, patent experts from the worlds of politics, business and patent applicants commented on the Green Paper. The watchword of this exercise was: "One Europe, one currency, one patent". The way in which the results are put into practice will determine the nature of the European Patent Organisation.

2. Annotated Links

kober-01.png, kober-02.png: The Original (large images)
European Patent Office: High Above Legality: The European Patent Office finances itself by fees from the patents which it grants. It is free to use a certain percentage of these fees. Since the 1980s the EPO has illegally lowered the standards of technicity, novelty, non-obviousness and industrial applicability and abolished examination quality safeguards so as to increase the number of granted patents by more than 10% and the license tax on the industry by 26% per year. As an international organisation, the EPO is not subject to criminal law or taxation. The local police's power ends at the gates of the EPO. High EPO officials have inflicted corporal injury on their employees and then escaped legal consequences by their right to immunity. The work climate within the EPO is very bad, leading to several suicides per year. The quality of examination reached a relative high in the 80s but has after that been deteriorating, partly because the EPO had to hire too many people too quickly for too low wages. Examiners who reject patents load more work on themselves without getting more pay. Examiners are treated by the EPO management as a kind of obstacle to the corporate goal of earning even more patent revenues. The high-level employees of the EPO owe their jobs to political pressures from within national patent administrations and do not understand the daily work of the office. The EPO has its own jurisdictional arm, consisting of people whose career is controlled by the EPO's managment, which again is strongly influenced by industry patent lawyers (on the Standing Advisory Committee (SACEPO)) and by the Office's internal climate. The national organs that are supposed to supervise the EPO are all part of the same closed circle, thus guaranteeing the EPO managment enjoys feudal powers beyond constitutional legality, and that whatever they decide is propagated to the national administrations and lawcourts.
Ingo Kober and Software Patents: president of the European Patent Office (EPO) since the mid-nineties, former FDP (liberal party) secretary of state in the BMJ (ministery of justice), active promoter of patentability expansion and of international unification of the patent system.
Die Rolle des Europäischen Patentamts im Spannungsfeld globaler Wirtschaftsentwicklungen --- Bestandsaufnahme, Herausforderung und Ausblick: Dr. h.c. Ingo Kober, Präsident des Europäischen Patentamtes (EPA), erklärt in dieser überarbeiteten Fassung eines am 15. November 2000 im Rahmen des Patent- und Marken-Forums gehaltenen Vortrages, welche Meilensteine auf dem Weg zum Ziel eines weltweit einheitlichen Patentschutzes auf allen wirtschaftlich interessanten Gebieten schon zurückgelegt wurden und noch zurückzulegen sind. Er erklärt dabei, dass die soeben abgehaltene Diplomatische Konferenz zwar nicht den Wünschen des EPA entsprechend Art 52 EPÜ geändert hat, aber dass das EPA dennoch mit voller Unterstützung der Regierungen weiterhin Patente auf Computerprogramme und computer-gestützte geschäftliche Methoden (sic!) erteilen wird.